“Marienka Bora Novotna.” She pauses a moment: “Zoli.”
“It's a funny name.”
“Perhaps.”
“May I ask one thing? I was wondering. I think I've seen your photograph once. In the newspaper.”
“Maybe.”
“I ask only then—”
“Yes?”
“How have you come to this?”
He looks beyond her, eyes distant, and she realizes then that it is not a question she is cal ed upon to answer, rather it is something he is asking himself, or some old self standing in the distance, amid the trees, and he wil ask it again, later, when he feels the hard rol of axe handle in his hand: How have you come to this?
“There are worse things,” says Zoli.
“I can't think of them, can you?”
She turns her face towards the distance.
“Hey,” says the younger, “what are we going to say to the Englishman if he comes back?”
“Say to him?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps,” says Zoli, “you wil tel him his fortune.”
At the top of a hil she looks north and south—Bratislava and its towers long gone now, not even a hint of them on the skyline. She is pleased by the silence as it reverberates from horizon to horizon. There are days when she walks great distances and the only sound she discerns is the swish of her own clothing.
At a lonely farmhouse she crouches behind a barn, listening. She crosses to the huts and undoes the string that holds the hasp. A few scrawny hens eye her from behind the wooden slats. When she reaches in, one erupts from the box with a long squawk and flies past her. Il egal, of course, to own chickens— they must belong to a family nearby. She reaches in a second time, keeping the gap in the door tight. In the uproar the others take to the air and she lunges and grabs one by the wing. She holds it in the wel of her skirt, and breaks the neck with a simple twist, fol ows with a second. From the nesting boxes she fil s her pockets with eggs and wraps them in the cathedral tea towel.
She unwinds a long piece of thread from her coat, ties it around the neck of the animals, and places them together at her belt, where they bounce against her thigh as she walks, as if stil alive and protesting.
Hunger has made me original, she thinks: the chicken-stealing Gypsy.
Three afternoons later it occurs to her from roadsigns that she has already crossed the border into Hungary. She had expected a concertina of barbed wire to mark it, or a high concrete watchtower, but maybe it was just a hedge or a furrowed field or the little vil age where they spoke both languages. Perhaps it was when she crossed the shal ow streambed in the forest, snow fal ing and trees darkly waving. It startles her, the ease with which she has crossed from one place into another, the landscape whol y alien and yet so much the same. The other border, East and West, she knows, wil begin in a matter of days and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
The first of the wooden watchtowers appears on stilts like a tal wooden bird. Two soldiers perch within it, scanning the horizon. Here, Hungary.
There, in the distance, Austria. She creeps along, half-bent to the earth, her body porous to every noise. Before her, the haze of mist drifting off the marsh. The air is cold, but lines of sweat run along her shoulderblades. She has stripped her bundle down to the barest needs—only a wickerjar of water, some cheese, some bread, the tarp, a blanket, her warmest clothes, the stolen knife. She backs a good distance away from the watchtowers, settles in the grass far from the dirt road, feels for a dry place to lie down.
No more movement, thinks Zoli, until nightfal .
She tracks the sun awhile across the sky, through the woven shapes of the branches above, until the last of the mist has burned off. How strange to try to sleep in such light, but it is important to rest, and to keep warm—there can be no fire.
Afternoon birdcal wakes her. The sun has shifted southward, red at its edges. She lifts her head slightly at the sound of an engine, and sees, in the distance, a squat truck with a canvas back trundling along the forest line. The voices of young soldiers, Russians, carry through the forest. How many dead bodies lie along these imaginary lines? How many men, women, children shot as they made the short trip from one place to the other?
The army truck passes along the edge of the trees and away, and, as if by design, two white swans break across the sky, their shapes laboring above the treetops, quartering on the wind with their necks craned, apparitions not so much of grace as difficulty, with the gunneling sound that comes from their mouths, a deathcal .
Other people, she knows, have had reasons to cross—for land, or nation, or desire, but she has no reason, she is empty, clean, raw. Once, as a child, traveling with her grandfather, she had seen a hunger artist in a vil age west of the mountains. He had set himself up in a cage and made a spectacle of his starvation. She watched him as his ribs grew clearer, stronger, almost musical. He lasted forty-four days and he looked so much like an old man when they took him from the cage that she was surprised to see him given, at last, a plate of crumbs and a drink of milk. This is how I am, she thinks: I have made a spectacle of myself, and now I am taking their crumbs. It is stil possible to turn around—there is nothing to prove.
And yet I have come this far, there is no more reason to return than there is to advance.
Zoli shifts slightly on the blanket. I should sleep, build up my strength, pul myself together, free my mind, become clear.
By early evening it seems to her that the darkness has begun to lift itself out of the earth, overtaking the grays
